by Chris Gilson
The doorway to the Koi Tower’s twelve-story glass atrium lobby had purposely been built lopsided, to conform to the principles of feng shui. It always disoriented Chester when he walked through. To the left of the crooked doorway, a theme restaurant called Splendid Shanghai beckoned. Its red-enameled facade reminded him of Mann’s Chinese Theater. Chester despised the sepulchral glitz of the lobby and hated seeing the three tiny Panda sedans in red, white, and blue that turned on pedestals on the lobby floor.
The express elevator deposited Chester and Tucker on the executive floor. They headed for Tucker’s office, decorated in hard-edged slabs of glass, marble, and hammered steel. His X-shaped desk had once belonged to his teenage hero, a junk-bond king. Tucker had plucked it out of his idol’s former office in Beverly Hills, and Chester had gratefully paid a fortune for it.
Tucker stopped by the gunmetal-colored desks where his two secretaries sat within his shouting distance. Both wore dark gray or black as Tucker required.
“Susan,” Tucker snapped, and the older blond woman jumped and followed him.
Chester noticed for the first time as he looked at the forty-year-old woman’s downcast eyes, how Tucker’s few older staff members behaved as though they’d had the stuffing kicked out of them.
Tucker’s phalanx of ten young executives stood assembled in his office. Chester entered, briefly and tentatively, to say hello to the group. They were just kids, and reminded him of the wide-eyed, frightening youngsters who worked for politicians. They stood eager as Jack Russell terriers, practically quivering in their conservative shirts and ties and clutching their own laptops, their busy foreheads crammed full of tactical moves. The tireless fury of their youth deflated him, making him feel old and ineffectual.
“Hi,” he said, stopping before adding, “kids.”
“Hello, Mr. Lord.” Their heads all bobbed, unfailingly polite to him. Now Tucker would ask them for something impossible and they would give it to him.
“People,” Tucker barked, “you have eight hours to do a worldwide information search. You will prepare me a detailed briefing. You’ll also need to find a sophisticated electronics store, get our travel people out of bed and working the phones, and send a shopping team to a number of retail stores that I’ll list for you. Problems?”
The energy in the room sizzled.
“Tucker,” a red-cheeked woman with short hair said. “Can I ask you what client this is for?”
“No, you can’t,” Tucker told her.
“Is there a billing number?” Susan his secretary asked.
“Yeah,” Tucker sat with a tiny smile. “Tesla 001.”
Cornelia arrived at JFK Airport at 7:30 P.M. She’d slept in the museum and stayed there until it was time to leave in the early morning. Dr. Powers, keeper of her secrets, hugged her and warned her one last time to be careful traveling alone. “You can change your mind,” he told her, but she was determined.
Early in their relationship, she had worried that Dr. Powers might call her father at some point, outraged at seeing her working anonymously and misunderstood. But he had stuck to his promise to never reveal her secrets. Since the day they met at the event for the Tesla Society, she and Dr. Powers had bonded over the museum. When they flew the Tesla airship together and he taught her the controls, she almost cried to be so appreciated and trusted.
But she never allowed herself to view Dr. Powers as a surrogate father. No matter how exasperating he might be, her real father would one day come to his senses. She believed that.
Cornelia moved rapidly through the big, modern International Terminal at JFK, no Thorazine Shuffle now. Bushberg’s drugs, those sly paralytic juices, had mostly evaporated from her bloodstream. The blue and white Air Brasilia counters she approached held a row of nutty-brown Brazilians, festive-looking even in their dark blue uniforms.
“Hi,” the woman behind the counter said, a caffe latte face under curly hair. “How can I help you?”
“I have a reservation on the 9:30 to Rio.”
The night flight to Rio. A delicious thought.
She placed her credit card and passport on the counter tentatively. Could Chester have reported her to the State Department to revoke her passport? No, that was silly. And he knew nothing about her American Express platinum card. He would have no way to cancel it, nor could a detective trail her transactions, she didn’t think. But still she held her breath as the creamy Brazilian’s fingers flew over the keyboard. The agent studied Cornelia’s passport and handed it back with her ticket and platinum card.
“Have a pleasant flight, Ms. Lord. Please use our first-class lounge to wait.”
Gotta dance, ran through the Electric Girl’s head.
She did a little skip. She wouldn’t concentrate now on her regret at leaving her father with his wall-to-wall worry without so much as a goodbye. She would get word to him soon. Perhaps once he knew she was all right, he would even feel relieved that she was gone. He could stay in the cocoon of Cornelia’s photographs and his memories of his little girl.
Now she needed to focus on her mission.
She walked swiftly to the lounge, making sure no one was following her. Kevin Doyle, of the sky-blue corona, had joked about her black outfit. She didn’t wear black to be stealthy like a ninja, but to simplify her life by reducing time-draining vanity. Wearing all black in New York City attracted little attention.
The cozy Air Brasilia lounge was too crammed with noisy, happy-looking voyagers enjoying its bar. Cornelia found a quiet section for business travelers. Like most such areas, this was a masterwork of soulless comfort. Uprooted prisoners of modern business made phone calls, pecked away at laptop computers, and stared dispiritedly out the glass windows at the tarmac. She sat in a leather chair so slick she nearly slid out of it. She relaxed, stretching her legs out.
A man who sat with his back to her, working on a laptop, turned around.
“Hi,” Tucker said.
The warm buzz tingling through her turned icy cold now. She started to fling herself up out of the chair.
Tucker touched her arm gently. “Sit, Corny. I’d just like to show you something.”
She hesitated, then settled back. How could he have known? Not even Chester knew. The thought of Dr. Powers calling Tucker made her suddenly ill. Then she swallowed, angry at herself for thinking that he would ever betray her. Maybe the thought was paranoid, but even paranoids can have excessively nosy would-be boyfriends who might want to interfere with their plans.
Tucker seemed calm enough, punching a key on his laptop and turning the screen around to her. The pixels crawled into a shape she recognized.
She couldn’t believe what he was showing her.
“What I’d suggest,” Tucker said, “and only suggest, because you’re free to do what you want, is a way to use the two hours before your flight leaves. I want to take you somewhere here in the airport. If you don’t like what I show you, I’ll bring you right back.”
“How can I trust you?”
He smiled and held up two fingers, a parody of a hippie peace sign. “This is a meeting. Not an abduction.”
She fretted like Chester. As easy as it was to read Kevin Doyle, whose eyes she could jump in without fearing what she might find, Tucker’s were slippery and unfathomable.
But if what he just showed her was real, it would change her life forever.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Show me.”
Chapter Nine
Kevin slowly climbed the staircase. He bent down to feel the stiff new imitation indoor-outdoor carpet, the Astroturf the landlord had laid right after his mother tumbled down the cement stairs nearly one month earlier. Kevin looked up at the new sixty-watt light bulb in the ceiling fixture. The landlord had paid the utilities this month, too.
Tonight a lawyer was coming by to talk to the family about the accident.
Trudging up past three hallways full of pungent smells in his parents’ walk-up building stabbed him with memories. He tried to imagine
the way his mother would have seen it as a newlywed full of energy and hope. It was only supposed to be their starter place. Then life dropped by with three kids. No wonder she got lost in the Time Life art books.
When his mother grew up in Bloody Forehead, Ireland, art appreciation probably meant not throwing rocks at the church’s stained glass windows. He imagined her discovering Giotto’s Lost Saint Sebastian. She had traveled to Dublin with her brother Eddie. Waiting for Eddie to arrange two tramp-steamer tickets to New York City, she snuck into the National Museum in Dublin and stood there glued to the painting. Maybe she felt like the saint, looking for meaning in another place. But, whatever she felt, she wanted to share it with Kevin by taking him, not his sisters, to the Metropolitan Museum when the Lost Saint Sebastian came to New York.
It was his tenth birthday. He remembered her hands, warm on his shoulders. She made a little gasp when Kevin pointed out the simple lines and shadows that Giotto used to show them Sebastian’s character, just from looking through the Time Life art books with her. He told her that he saw Giotto’s spark of the divine. From that moment, she treated him as special.
When Kevin got through high school, Uncle Eddie waited with his tight little tyrant’s grin for Kevin to ask for a doorman job. No, his mother tapped her finger on Eddie’s chest. Kevin would not start a career with the City of New York, or be one of Eddie’s doormen. Kevin could work night jobs if necessary, but he would not have to take a real job. Kevin would study art.
This Thanksgiving, his secret plan had been to lead her by the hand to the Stinson Gallery. He would surprise her the same way she had brought him to the Metropolitan Museum. He would show her the Saint Sebastian he made for her, in a real gallery.
That was going to be his gift to her.
Now she would never see his Sebastian, and he had wound up begging Eddie, whose idea of art was Dogs Playing Poker, for a steady job to pay his rent.
Kevin tramped up the last flight to the fourth landing. He put his key in the metal door, stepping back when his father opened it for him.
He swallowed. His dad was only fifty-three, but he looked old now, face bleached, chin resting on his shirtfront like a sad, tired bloodhound.
Dennis Doyle had always prided himself on his fastidiousness. Tonight, his neck seemed to have shrunk in his shirt, and a gray stubble covered his raw chin. His eyes had always revealed a little glimmer of the clever boy from Limerick. Now they burrowed in their red rims, lonely and disbelieving, the skin around them pebbly. His dad looked lost. Maybe Kevin should stay at the apartment with him until he found the groove of his new life.
“Hey, Dad,” Kevin greeted him with a hug. His father tensed at his touch. They weren’t easy huggers, the Doyle men.
“Well, the artist,” Dennis said quietly. “Our lawyer, Jon Landau’s coming in a half-hour and the girls are here already. Watch your step around the piles of tissues. The girls mean well, but they make me feel worse with Marne ready to smack somebody and Helen all weepy. How’s the job?”
“Great,” Kevin said.
He kept his smile hitched up while his father took the two bags he carried. He glared at the thin plastic one containing a roasted chicken from the Hamas Deli, dry from twirling on the spit, and a pound of greasy macaroni salad. But he smiled at the brown paper bag twisted at the top, a fifth of Bushmills.
Kevin looked around the apartment expecting, as he always did, some small change to mark the fact that his mother no longer lived there. The mail she sorted through on November 23 remained on the table by the door. Even the scent of her cosmetics lingered in the apartment, probably on the sheets and towels his father would not send to the laundry.
The living room of the Doyles’ apartment, sixteen feet square, looked out on Third Avenue through wood-paneled windows half covered with yellowed white drapes. A brown couch and two plaid chairs huddled close together before a gigantic TV set. The day he turned fifteen, they carried home the thirty-two-inch Magnavox and rearranged all the seats to face the tube.
Wall-to-wall photographs of Kevin and his sisters from newborn babies through high school graduation, multilayered with more photos that covered the tables and walls, created a silent documentary of the Doyle family’s Big Events.
In the traditional world of the Doyles, Kevin realized for the first time, the next Big Event for each of them would be the disease or accident that killed them.
“Hey, Kevin.” His sister Marne hopped up and squeezed him.
Marne got his mother’s nice features and auburn hair. She also worked out every day with free weights. When Kevin lightly gripped her forearm through her thin jacket sleeve, it was like he could be holding a length of hard rope.
He sniffed her hair. “You went back to work.”
“They gave me three weeks.” Marne, twenty-six and single, became a firefighter after two years at City College. Kevin cared about both his sisters, but he looked up to Marne. Not many people chose storming into an inferno, lungs filling with smoke, for the same salary you could earn as a bartender.
And Marne had always backed him up, like his mom. In school, she’d poke guys her age in the eye and make them yowl for picking on her little brother.
“How’s your job, Kevin?”
“Great,” he said. Flicking a glance to make sure his father wasn’t looking, he silently snapped his right fist by his neck and let his tongue roll out of his mouth, to look like he was hanging himself.
She giggled and mussed his hair.
Helen was twenty-eight, but looked middle-aged. When specialists told her she was unable to have kids—at least not without fertility drugs that she worried might give her octuplets—her youth seemed to burn out like the pilot light in a stove. She started to pull her hair back, wear sensible shoes, and take on the rhythms of a municipal-payroll lifer who lived for weekends and vacations. To Kevin, she was serving out a sentence.
While Dennis Doyle took the bags into the kitchen, Kevin went to the sagging shelves over the couch and ran his finger over the old set of Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes from A to Z. He pulled out the C volume and read a short section.
“What are you reading?” Helen frowned.
“Nothing,” Kevin told her, closing the book, looking around the apartment.
At his mother’s wake, this living room had throbbed like an Irish boombox. The rumbling bass sounds came from his mom’s people, the Feeneys. They were descended from the Finnachs, the Irish word for fighters. Their faces wore the stamp of craggy western Ireland. They never spoke at less than a bellow. His mom always seemed a mutant in her family, since she seldom yelled and her face never furrowed into dark lines and shadows. His dad’s people, the more sociable Doyles, had softer faces with big ears. They came from Limerick, where they sold green beer and plastic shillelaghs to Americans tourists who used expressions like “Top of the mornin’ to you” that no real Irish kid had ever heard.
Kevin remembered his childhood as a constant bedlam. Everybody yelled just to make conversation. Kevin squeezed himself into whatever quiet space he could find, sometimes out on the fire escape, even when it snowed.
Now he longed to roil in that old bedlam. His dad would live in this empty-feeling apartment for the rest of his life. He would never re-marry.
His father was coming back from the kitchen. He carried a short whiskey on the rocks in each hand, handed one to his son.
“I was just thinking,” Kevin started. “Maybe I could move in here for a while.”
He didn’t say what he really thought, that his father had no life without his mom. But it was true. Dennis Doyle never wanted anything more than to be with his wife. He wasn’t like other neighborhood men who snuck out to Riley’s Sports Bar and had to be dragged home.
“You’ll be lonely, Kevin,” Dennis blew him off, sounding phony-brave. “I’m ready to get back to work. By the way, the building residents made a donation to the Heart Association in your mother’s name. They didn’t get it right, but I suppose it’s
the thought that counts.”
Kevin sat in one of the faded plaid chairs across from his father. He put his drink on the coffee table, alongside a TV Guide for the Thanksgiving week when his mom died. He had always believed, when his parents’ mortality began to dawn on him, that his dad would die first.
“To Mom,” Kevin said. They sipped the whiskey slowly, both drinking to dull the edge, but not get high or drunk.
Dennis got up as though he’d forgotten something. He came back with a copy of the previous day’s Globe, opened to the “Don’t Drop Deb!” headline. Dennis passed it to Kevin and lifted his eyebrow.
His sisters stared at him as though they’d already seen it.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he told them.
His father frowned. “I could tell by your ears. What are you getting up to in that building? This kind of stuff won’t do you any good with the management, you know.”
“Her boyfriend called me in the lobby, asked me to help him with her. She has some problems.”
“I’ve read about her before, Corny the Deb,” Marne said. “That girl’s trouble, Kevin.”
Kevin shrugged, not ready to gossip.
“Do you talk to this girl?” Helen asked him, looking worried that the deb and her doorman brother would be friendly.
“She was asleep.” Kevin sighed. “She woke up and said, ‘Great corona.’ Then she passed out again.”
“Corona?” Marne asked him. “The beer?”
“Or an electrical arc. We use them making neon. Or maybe a crown. Or a burning star. I just looked up a bunch of definitions.”
“Are you interested in the girl or something, Kevin?” his father said. “They have rules against fraternization, don’t they?”